Reshaping the Construction Industry

In a message posted last February by Mark H. Ayers, president of Building & Construction Trades Department, Mr. Ayers expresses his frustration with the prevalent practice of misclassification of workers in order to get away with under-compensating workers in the industry.  One major side-effect of misclassification is workers not receiving deserved benefits such as health insurance.  Ayres points out that lack of affordable health care options for those who are misclassified as independent contractors results in high numbers of uninsured workers.  This ultimately costs the taxpayers money in higher emergency room costs for the uninsured and their families.  Ayres writes:  “The construction industry – again, an industry dominated by the utilization of a low-wage, low-skill workforce – saddles the U.S. health care system with the highest injury and illness rate among all private industries.  In fact, it has the highest rate of non-fatal injuries and illnesses of any American industry, and it has three times the fatality rate of other private industries.

According to an article in the July-August 2010 issue of Design-Build Dateline, even though construction firms tend to adopt new ideas and methods a bit slowly, Lean construction...

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the construction industry lost 22,000 jobs during the month of June.  Some might assume this means that recruiting an adequate workforce is no longer a burning issue, but we know that despite the current conditions, there will be a shortage of construction workers by 2018 especially in the mid-level jobs.  My company recently completed the team building exercise of describing our ideal workforce for 2015.  It turns out that we have some work to do.  We are a commercial subcontractor and live and die by the talents and efforts of our supervisors, foremen, lead men, and journeymen.  In our exercise, we described each job title and how they would demonstrate leadership in every area of focus: productivity, safety, quality, company culture, and workforce development (training and developing future talent).  

We recently attended the annual update meeting staged by Kiley Advisors in Houston.  One of the most interesting sessions had three speakers who discussed the plusses of Lean Construction and the legal changes underway as this process is integrated into the industry.  Interestingly I found a very good description of the overall process in Wikipedia.Basically the Lean Construction Management System is an adaptation of the Lean Production System utilized by Toyota in its production plants.